


Christmas Gift

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-18
Updated: 2011-12-18
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:18:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes, they celebrate Christmas without screaming, running, aliens, or adoring companions. For <a href="http://leiascully.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://leiascully.livejournal.com/"><b>leiascully</b></a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas Gift

It was a quiet Christmas, that year. They only had so many, with her fragile, mortal parents; they must always pick and choose which of their years to share.

They met at the flat she kept in case of unauthorized prison leave. It was small and cozy and, in honor of the occasion, festooned with a lovely miniature tree and a sprig of holly above the door. She let him in with a gentle smile and admitted that she must have picked up a flu somewhere, would he mind _terribly_ if they forwent alien invasions and exploding planets and just had a night on the couch, watching old Christmas movies?

It’d do, in a pinch, he agreed, and they changed into an absurd set of matching Christmas pajamas and settled on her couch under an ancient afghan her father had once knitted for her. They watched the old classics, one after another, until they ran out of ones they could reasonably convince themselves were interesting. They played footsie and managed half a game of monopoly, all the things people _do_ for Christmas, and even made cookies. They were superb, if you were willing to overlook the fact that they mistook salt for sugar and substituted Vegemite chips for chocolate.

The Doctor liked them, anyway.

Later she went to lie down and he made her a mug of hot chocolate and they talked about the Christmases they’d shared, skirting around spoilers of Christmases yet to come. She teased him that they were the embodiment of A Christmas Carol, all those ghosts of past and present, and he asked which of them was meant to be Scrooge. And she asked, timid in the way that she never was unless she was tired, if it was always this hard to leave them behind, and he knew exactly what she meant.

He couldn’t tell her that it wasn’t, as much as he wanted to. They slept that night, tangled in each other and dreaming as if they truly did have eternity together.

They woke to light streaming through her window, and she smiled and kissed him and said she had something for him. There was a brief argument about their prior decision not to do gifts after a particularly spoilery incident, but she hushed him and said that this was something he’d given her, too.

She shimmied so that she was sitting against the headboard and maneuvered his head so that it rested on her lap, his ear against her stomach, where he could hear: her heartbeat, and two more. She watched with a fond smile and shining eyes as first realization, then panic, complete with dramatic pacing, and finally inextinguishable joy settled over him.

She asked him, just once, if he was happy. He kissed her, deeply and fully, in answer, and she smiled and brushed his hair back from his face, and she promised:

I will always be with you.

* * *


End file.
